


Echo

by Lisse



Category: Firefly, Hetalia: Axis Powers, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Crossover, Future Fic, Gen, Hetalia Kink Meme, Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-21
Updated: 2009-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-25 12:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/953129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisse/pseuds/Lisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paving roads to hell with good intentions. In space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echo

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for a fairly specific hetalia_kink crossover request. Spoilers for Serenity. Serious because I fail.

Miranda is no one's idea, as these things often are. It takes shape gradually over the course of decades, growing out of studies and proposals and committees into something insidious, until finally Alfred walks into the lonely echoing world-house Yao calls home and drops a deceptively thin memo on his desk.

"I think it will work," he says.

Yao reads it. He looks up.

As happens more and more these days, they communicate without speaking.

It's wonderfully simple. They both remember the chaos and the wars, the way Earth cracked and split long before anyone got the bright idea to abandon it forever. Peace - quick, easy, painless _peace_ , even achieved with morally ambiguous means - is something neither of them have the courage or the desire to turn down.

Miranda is no one's idea.

In the end, it is everyone's fault.

*

"We've done something terrible," Yao says from the observation deck of his ship - _their_ ship, really, because they share a government and a flag and pretty words on paper, which is the closest their kind can ever come to something like marriage. There is no particular judgment in his voice. He is very very old, and one of the prices of living as long as he has is that he has been both victim and perpetrator many times over.

This is merely a grander scale than all the others.

"It's not..." Alfred trails off, stops, tries again. His hands clench at his sides, hidden under the gloves of his rumpled Alliance uniform. "It's _not_. We had to try. It's necessary."

"Ah."

"It _is_."

"Necessity is often terrible."

Alfred doesn't answer.

Yao glances at him sidelong, examining him in that strange shifting way so many countries had of looking at each other back on Earth. With his eyes, he follows the fragile latticework of compromises and under-the-table deals and sprawling corporations. They have been knit together haphazardly, because Alfred has forced them into a shape they were never meant to support, and the result is something brittle and hollow and, occasionally, frightening.

He feels - as Alfred surely must - the beginnings of something swirling and empty at the edges of his awareness, down below on Miranda's surface. Among the people who peacefully lost their will to eat and speak and breathe, there are the ones who live, if it can be called that - remembering only how to hate and kill and scream.

"We didn't do anything wrong," Alfred says, as if he believes it.

Sometimes terrible things are necessary. Yao knows that.

He looks down at the planet and hears _Miranda, Miranda_ like an echo of words that haven't been spoken yet, and he thinks that this horrible gaping madness is not one of them.

*

There is an art to surviving. Yao is its master.

By now he knows which parts of himself are essential and which can be discarded. He wraps up the key pieces of his language and traditions and history and carries them cradled against his chest as if he is a father guarding his child, and when the time is right he unbundles them and uses them as his framework, filling in the gaps with whatever else is at hand.

He's done this for more centuries than he cares to count. Building half an Alliance around millennia-old bones - holding himself together and knowing exactly who and what he _is_ \- is far from the most impossible feat he's ever accomplished.

Alfred is different. He is built on carefully articulated ideals and brute strength, and he is much too young and too used to holding his own simply by virtue of being what he is. When the world breaks apart he doesn't know where to turn, which pieces of him can be safely abandoned and which make him what he is, until in the end everything he is tears and shreds and scatters.

He rebuilds too, out of whatever he remembers. The results are not always pretty.

When they are married, as their first bosses like to jokingly describe the treaties and long-winded ceremonies and governing documents, Yao is still perfectly recognizable, still one of many incarnations of himself.

Alfred is too - but only because, somehow, the one thing he remembers to save is his name.

*

Once or twice he wonders if Alfred hears it – _Miranda, Miranda_ flitting fitfully across their empty worlds, the hushed warnings of a child who hasn't been born.

It would, of course, be an ordinary human child. Out of all the hundreds of countries on Earth, only the two of them are left, and their people are scattered haphazardly across the Alliance's worlds. There will be no more of their kind - no twin Koreas, no Japan, no Hong Kong, no fiercely stubborn Taiwan.

Alfred tells him, eventually, how Miranda's survivors - the closest things they have to children - procreate.

"We didn't do anything wrong," he says.

_Miranda, Miranda_ says the child-who-isn't-yet - Yao knows now that Alfred doesn't hear it - and for a fleeting moment he wishes creating another of their kind were as easy as torturing someone's sanity away piece by piece.

"We did everything wrong," he says back, and this, too, is without judgment.

Alfred turns on his heel and stalks back to his own world (the one he won't admit naming in honor of England's dead capital), alone with the ghosts he can't hear.

*

Sometimes the two of them sit amid their paperwork and secrets and carefully constructed silences, as close to shoulder-to-shoulder as they can come. They weave their shared far-flung people together with debts and bureaucracy and force, exactly the same way most empires are constructed. It is a system Yao is familiar with, just as he is at least passingly acquainted with most of the others. It isn't in him to soften it with euphemisms, no matter how much a continuous stream of bosses frown at him.

He knows its goods as well as its bads. It will do for now.

"It's a good system," Alfred says, because that hasn't changed about him; if it is his, it _must_ be right. "A good government. We're keeping everyone together."

"Ah," says Yao.

With no little fascination, he watches the way Alfred scoops up the planets as if he can bundle them together by sheer force of will. It doesn't do any good, of course, not the way it did on Earth. Here there is no common purpose to bind them to him. 

The discontent grows and rumbles in the corners and forgotten places of their Alliance. Alfred gets angrier and angrier, lashing out even as he pretends not to listen. There is something horrible about him without his ideals to hold him in check.

Yao sees the rebellion coming too - he would be blind not to - but he is unconcerned.

There is a reason he has survived as long as he has, and why his Mandate of Heaven is one of the treasures he carries safely away from Earth.

*

In the end the revolution is doomed from the start.

It erupts in fits and starts and disjointed voices across a dozen different worlds. Alfred shouts at them all - he's trying to keep everyone together, how _dare they_ \- and ignores Yao when he sighs and points out that the independence movement is disorganized and outgunned.

"Be serious," Alfred snaps.

Yao looks up at him. "I sent the same soldiers as you," he says patiently.

He waves his arms - the manic energy from Earth gone just slightly mad, if Yao allows himself to think about it. "What if they win?"

"They won't."

"What if they do?"

Yao thinks of mandates and dynasties toppling like dominoes. "Then we'll have to wait and see," he says, "won't we?"

*

They go to Serenity Valley together, during a lull in the fighting. Alfred insists.

Yao walks ghost-silent through the heaps of dead. He is not unmoved, but he has seen worse in one way or another. When he feels fingers curl around his wrist, he decides he is diplomatic enough not to comment; he doubts Alfred is aware of what he's doing.

One of the rebels is standing in their path, unflinching. She is a child - but not _the_ child, the one whose cries of _Miranda, Miranda_ have grown louder and louder these past few years - and a few centuries ago she might have been one of Yao's people. They have the same hair, the same height, the same eyes. Even her clothing isn't all that different from something his soldiers might have worn long long ago, for all that the blue cloth is faded and patched and half-hidden under a ragged brown coat.

" _Chiu se!_ " she shouts at them in the now-familiar bastardized version of one of Yao's many many languages, unafraid for all that she is thin and bloody and unarmed. "Alliance! I hate you! _Chiu se!_ I _hate_ you!"

Alfred looks at her with something that might be betrayal, and then raises his gun in one swift movement and shoots her in the stomach.

Yao waits until she falls before he looks away. "Not a killing wound," he says, although in this valley it will be, soon enough.

"I missed," Alfred says, holstering his gun. He walks away quickly, oblivious to the bullets and shells that can't kill him, not now.

He probably doesn't notice that his hands are shaking.

*

"We'll make it better now," Alfred tells him later, when the war is over. "A more perfect union."

His words have the rippling resonance of something that used to be important. Yao looks up at him - but no, whatever Alfred was on Earth, there is still no trace of that now.

"We will try," he agrees, and does not ask what the words used to mean or where they came from.

They are still the creations of their people - and sometimes the people remember, even when their country has forgotten.

*

Miranda's secrets wake up screaming.

A little ship with its little ordinary people dives headlong into the madness, carried along by the child who whispers before she is born. Yao feels the foundations of the Alliance tremble. It is only fitting, he thinks, that their attempt to create a quick easy peace caused this kind of far-reaching chaos.

Sometimes terrible things are necessary and sometimes they are not, but they are never without repercussions.

Countries have died for less.

Alfred doesn't understand this. He paces back and forth, gun in hand. Surely he knows he is unraveling again, that his government may or may not be coming apart at the seams, but he is still so young - and this time he has nothing left to preserve.

It is almost a relief when someone walks - _storms_ , really - into their commandeered conference room.

Yao starts to rise from his seat, because he is sure of his immortality, but also quite aware of his ability to feel pain. He stops when he sets eyes on the intruder – before he's done more than place his hands on the armrests to push himself up.

Maybe Alfred wonders why he doubles over, laughing in the choking helpless way of someone who shouldn't be happy, but _is_. Then again, maybe Alfred is too busy pointing his gun at the intruder.

"I thought I killed you already," he says. The blood is draining out of his face.

The rebel from Serenity Valley still has no weapon. She is older and healthier and the wide cocky grin splitting her face is not Yao's and never has been. Of course it wouldn't be. The bravery and the ability to survive may be his legacy, but _this_ \- the stupid showboating, the flashy entrances, the heroics - aren't from his side of the family.

He wonders what the rebels would have named her.

"My people," she says, all grand belligerent optimism, and the little ship is shouting _Miranda, Miranda_ loud enough for everyone to hear. " _My people._ "

Sometimes it doesn't matter that the country has forgotten.

The gun slides from Alfred's fingers.


End file.
